A series of preparations must be made before a network element is deployed on a communications network to provide normal communications services. The preparations include three stages: data preparation stage, hardware installation stage, and the stage from power-on to formal service provisioning.
The data preparation stage includes activities such as some engineering survey jobs and use of a planning tool to generate configuration data required by an equipment. The hardware installation stage means that hardware installation engineers install hardware and connect the network element to a specified physical network after the hardware is transported to a site. The stage from power-on to formal service provisioning involves the following jobs: configuring network parameters such as an Internet Protocol (IP) address for the network element; installing software for the network element; providing the configuration data prepared at the data preparation stage for the network element; and verifying whether the network element is able to provide normal services. All jobs before the stage from power-on to formal service provisioning are manually completed by engineers at the site. To increase efficiency, the jobs at the stage from power-on to formal service provisioning can currently be completed through automatic configuration. Automatic configuration means that the jobs at the stage from power-on to formal service provisioning are automatically completed through interactions between the network element and an Element Management System (EMS).
Although an automatic configuration process can be automatically executed, a user may expect to intervene during the process instead of allowing complete automatic execution in certain circumstances. For this purpose, a stoppoint is adopted. Before execution of an automatic configuration process, the user sets a stoppoint in a critical step of the process. When running to a stoppoint, the execution of the automatic configuration process is stopped. The stopped execution is resumed after the user executes a resume operation. An automatic configuration process in the prior art is as follows:
The automatic configuration process is executed in order. When a stoppoint is met, the execution is stopped and an Integration Reference Point Agent (IRPAgent) sends a notification message to an Integration Reference Point Manager (IRPManager), waiting for a resume operation of the user. The IRPManager may send a resume command to the IRPAgent. After receiving the resume command, the IRPAgent resumes the automatic configuration process from the current stoppoint.
Through researches on the prior art, the inventor discovers the following problem: The automatic configuration process is resumed from the current stoppoint after the resume command is received. If multiple stoppoints are set for one automatic configuration process, the process stops at the first stoppoint. When two IRPManagers send two resume commands with respect to the first stoppoint at a short interval, after receiving the first resume command with respect to the first stoppoint, the IRPAgent resumes the automatic configuration process from the first stoppoint. If the process goes to the second stoppoint when the second resume command with respect to the first stoppoint arrives, the IRPAgent are triggered by the second resume command to resume the automatic configuration process from the second stoppoint. In this way, when two resume commands with respect to the first stoppoint are received, the automatic configuration process is resumed respectively from the first and the second stoppoints, while the user expects that the process be resumed only from the first stoppoint. As a result, actual operations are inconsistent with user expectations.